A Fort of Nine Towers (38 page)

I was just coming back into the courtyard, carrying water in buckets from the tap at the mosque below the garden. In those days, all the neighborhood water pumps installed around Kabul by the municipal government had dried because of a drought, and most of
the pipes had been destroyed. Now we had to go long distances to find a working well. The mosque had one in its garden. I had just made my fourth trip. I was tired and was trying to catch my breath.

The noise of the rocket exploding was so loud that in actual fact I heard nothing. I could only feel a heavy and deep wave that shook the entire fort. Smoke mixed with dust started pouring out first one, and then another of the three large windows that faced the courtyard. I was stunned and confused. What should I do with such smoke? How could I turn it off? I was afraid to get close to that room. But I did not want all of my father’s carpets to burn while I watched and did nothing. But I could not think of anything. I was very dizzy, and completely deaf.

I saw the mouth of my neighbor’s son was opening and closing, but I could not hear a word he was saying. He began touching my entire body, starting from my legs and going up and up. He was looking to see whether I was injured. He nodded at me that I was all right, and we turned and looked upstairs.

My father had rushed back from the neighbors’ house when he had heard the explosion. He met me just inside the gate of the courtyard, where I still held my buckets full of water.

I read horror and fear on his face. He asked me something. I could not hear him, but I instinctively knew he was asking whether my mother and the rest of the family were okay.

My mother and sisters had been watching a Bollywood movie downstairs, directly under the room that was hit. When the rocket exploded, it shook the whole fort, and the dust puffed out of the ceiling and cracks in the old mud walls.

Now my mother came running out into the courtyard with my sisters. She was almost dragging my little brother, even though he could walk now. In her arms, she had my newest little sister, who was only a few months old. From head to toe they were all covered with dust. They looked lost and confused and were probably deaf like me.

My father could see that they were not injured, and so he looked up at the storeroom, where all his hard work and our hope of ever fleeing Afghanistan were turning into smoke.

He grabbed my two heavy buckets full of water as if there were nothing in them and rushed up the outside stairs to the terrace in front of the burning room. I followed him. He jumped inside the room through the one window clear of smoke, holding one bucket. Then he gestured to me for the other.

Now he was inside. Lost in the thick, black smoke, he threw the water from the first bucket, unsure of where it was going. Where it hit, the smoke turned to fire, as if he had poured gasoline on it. He threw the second bucket, but he was suddenly surrounded by fire; he was in the heart of it. I could see he was shouting for help.

I shouted at him to run out through the fire before it got stronger and even more uncontrollable. I heard myself in my head louder than I actually sounded, and it was painful. Perhaps he heard me, or perhaps it was just his instincts. He leaped through the fire and jumped out the window. His shoes and trousers were in flames. The fire quickly rose to his chest and back.

Someone screamed at him to roll on the ground, probably my mother. The fire on his back appeared to go out when he rolled on it. But when he rolled onto his chest, the flames on his back flared up again. He kept rolling back and forth. My mother brought a bucket of water from our bathroom inside the house and poured it on him. Smoke mixed with steam rose over my father as he kept rolling back and forth on the earthen, now muddy terrace.

He stood up, surrounded by steam with smoke rising up all around him. We could hardly see his face. His clothes were badly singed, but somehow he was unharmed.

He grabbed another bucket of water that my sister brought from the house and rushed toward the windows. By now the fire was pouring out all three of the big windows. There was no doubt now that my father’s carpets were fueling that fire.

My mother raced after him, yelling, and held his shoulder to stop him from going into the blaze again with his small bucket of water. It was like spitting on such a fire.

My father shouted back at her as she tried to drag him away by one arm, but he shook her off and stood there as every second the fire grew bigger. I watched it all like a silent movie, as I could still hear
nothing. The roof beams by then were burning, and one of them collapsed onto his carpets. Slowly, his head fell down on his chest in despair. He put the bucket full of water by his feet.

One hour later, when the fire had already consumed the thick beams of the ceiling and what was left of the carpets, the firefighters arrived. None of their equipment fit through that one very small door into the courtyard and the angled passageway within. The fort with its high walls was like a large open box, and the firefighters had no ladders long enough to climb over and get inside it.

Our neighbors brought their narrow bamboo ladders, and eventually three firefighters climbed up the walls from the garden side and started pouring water into the heart of the fire. The blaze sent shadows of the dark and bitter-smelling smoke of burning wool over the whole neighborhood. The sky choked on it.

More neighbors arrived. But when they heard the muffled, defiant roar of the fire, they knew there was nothing they could do.

There was now thick, white smoke in place of the orange flames, and the black smoke lessened. The firefighters were finally able to go into the room and check for hot spots. The fire still smoldered in crevices in the walls.

After a couple of hours, it appeared to have died down. But the firefighters did not let us go in. The mud bricks in the walls had a lot of straw in them, with wooden posts and beams buried within. It could all flare up and start burning again at any time.

The courtyard was still full of our neighborhood people. Slowly, one by one they left, as night came, shaking their heads sadly, and talking about how big the fire had become in such a short time.

My father and I walked inside the burned-out room. The ceiling had fallen in, and everything was hot and steaming. He started looking for his carpets under the tons of mud that had been the earthen roof. He was breathing very hard.

He tried to dig the hot earth with his hands. It singed his fingers,
and he shouted at me to bring him a shovel instead of staring at him like a nutcase. I was now beginning to hear again, but with a loud ringing in my ears.

I brought him a shovel. He shoveled for half an hour without stop. He was soaked in sweat. His burned clothes clung to his back, and I could see every muscle straining. With each minute, his shoveling got faster and faster. Finally, he reached the floor and found nothing except a layer of ashes where his carpets had been.

“Oh God, why have you done this to me? Do I deserve this?” he cried out. It scared me. Such heavy grief from the depth of his soul.

A strong wind started to blow. Some of the half-burned wood caught fire again. My father cried for water. I brought him two buckets from the storage tank in our bathroom, and he poured them where the fire had blazed up. A minute later another crevice in the wall caught fire. We threw water there as well. Then another place flared up, and another, until seven o’clock the next morning. My father and I did not sleep that night, or eat either.

He did not want my mother and sisters sleeping in the rooms beneath the one that had burned, and so he made a shelter in the corner of the courtyard for them. All night, they kept waking up, hungry and cold, dreaming that there was another fire they had to put out.

The next night, my sisters were still afraid to move back into those rooms downstairs, though by then they were safe. Everything smelled of smoke, though, and was covered with dust.

We all slept in the shelter my father had made the previous night. We made a fire in front of it for light. It reminded me of those nights with the Kuchis when we ate and laughed and told stories with the sounds of the animals nearby in the darkness.

But we were not with the Kuchis anymore. Fire had a different meaning to us now. I was lying between my father and mother, and the sound of their breathing assured me of their sleep, though with my mother you could never tell. Sometimes she would wake in the middle of the night and stare into space with tears on her cheeks.

That night I had seen her crying again. I reached out and touched
her on the shoulder and asked whether she was all right. She quickly turned her back without replying. She never sobbed or wailed or sniffed like an ordinary person. She cried when nobody could see or hear her, letting the tears empty out of her in a stream of silent sorrow.

The next day we moved back into the downstairs rooms, even though they still smelled smoky. My father was deeply depressed. He did not help us carry our things back in. He sat under the acacia tree where Wakeel’s body had lain, his head on his knees, sitting like that for hours. It was as if he were dead himself. My mother asked him to have lunch with us, but he did not eat or drink anything. His lips were dry, and brown bags had formed under his eyes.

Finally, around one o’clock in the morning he came in and lay next to my mother. He was cold and shivering. My mother covered him with her blanket and hugged him until he stopped shaking. The next day, he did not talk to anyone. He just sat next to the window, staring outside at one spot, not knowing what he was looking at. When my sisters and I talked, we whispered. When we walked, we tiptoed. And when we ate, we tried not to make any sound with our spoons and forks.

After a week, he began to ask for a few things, like a glass of water, or a cup of tea. My mother began to cook everything salty or oily, knowing that my father did not like this. He started fussing about the salt and oil. My mother shouted back at him not to complain. He left the room and went out. My mother smiled at us and said, “He’ll come back happy like before.” We did not know what she was talking about.

Three hours later my father came back with bags of fruit and a few kilos of beef. He had a sad smile on his face, like his own father’s. That night my mother cooked us good food, and my father began to make jokes. The noise of forks and spoons started again. We did not have to whisper or tiptoe anymore.

The factions had started fighting yet again, and again trapped us in one room like mice in a hole.

The rockets were raining all over Kabul City nonstop. Gulbuddin
was firing his American rockets at the Panjshiris who lived in the area around our Fort of Nine Towers. Dostum, the Uzbek commander, was also sending his rockets against the Panjshiris, both to our area and to Makroyan. The Hazaras were sending rockets against the Panjshiris, who were also sending rockets to the Hazaras. Sayyaf fired rockets from the high mountains west of Kabul aimed at the Panjshiris and the Hazaras. Sometimes three thousand rockets fell on Kabul in one day. When the rockets stopped for a few minutes, it was unnaturally silent. But, in fact, there was never truly silence. The house was always talking to itself, the clicking of the clock in the next room, the periodic judder and whir of the refrigerator when we had electricity. From the bathroom the drip, drip, drip of water from the nozzle into a big pot full of water. Every now and then out on the road, there was the whoosh of a passing car or the rumble of a truck.

We listened for the sound of the releasing of the rocket, then its landing that shook the ground like an earthquake. In two months, twenty-nine rockets landed in that fort and its garden. The last of the nine towers still stood at the corner of the old fort, but it no longer made me feel safe. For more than a hundred years, the towers had protected the people inside. Not anymore. Not in this time of Shaitan.

One reason why Grandfather and the rest of the family had all moved to the solidly built blocks of Makroyan was that they thought it would be safer there. But they were as trapped in Makroyan as we were at the Qala-e-Noborja in Kart-e-Parwan. For weeks we had no idea what was happening to them. Were they still alive, dead, wounded? We had no phones; no one was in the street to carry a message. My father stopped listening to the BBC and the other news channels, because they made us even more anxious, telling us about the casualties and announcing the names of the injured in hospitals and the lack of blood for transfusions, or medicine, or doctors.

For whole days and weeks we sat at the corner of the room, murmuring our prayers and waiting for a rocket to kill us all together. One night when the noise of the exploding rockets was too loud to let me sleep, I climbed up on the roof of the old fort and sat near the one remaining tower. I watched one rocket after another fall on the flat-land neighborhoods in front of me. Each time when a rocket whistled
overhead, I was momentarily surprised that it had not killed me. But a part of me no longer cared. I simply presumed that one of them would soon land next to me, and that I would not live to see the morning.

Sometimes my father, mother, sisters, and I wrote letters to my grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When there was ceasefire for a day or two, we sent those letters that we had written days or weeks ago with anybody in the neighborhood we could find who had to go to Makroyan for some reason. In the same day we might receive a bunch of letters from all of them, if one of my uncles could make the trip. Then the war would set in again, and we would not hear from each other for weeks.

Those were the worst days of my life. Yet there was something sweet about them. Whenever I wrote letters, I was very careful to use the right words in the right places. I expected the same careful attention to detail from those who answered my letters. In those days when most people were worried about staying alive, I was focused on how to write a beautiful letter and express my feelings accurately about everything, and in precise chronological order. I was only just finding my way into my teenage years, but with life so fragile, the schooling I might have had, or the sports I might have played, or the work I might have done meant nothing.